THE AXIS OF TRUTH

1“Context is the great interpreter for gleaning truth from fact, but what range of circumstantial facts is sufficient to translate accurately? The real story is not in the reductionism of describing a thing, but in the expansionism of revealing it. That takes time, sensitivity, empathy, and, most important, the unfettered clarity of free association.

“Practically all of those things are missing from our daily lives. People rush along, gathering rumor for truth, propaganda for fact, dogma for realization, programming for critical thinking, and sound-bite rhetoric for evidence. They are more than happy to share the fruit of their [‘guesstimate’] with others. They blast it over the airwaves, launch it into cyberspace, put it into print, shout it from speeches, sing it from songs, and record it for posterity.”

“Straitjacketed by angst and bullied by conditioned beliefs, they sponge up the most superficial of information and reasoning, and set out like runaway trains for or against something. They saddle up and move out to defend, convert, or conquer.”

*(This realization keeps me grounded—as is possible—from flying without a reality point-of-fact gyro (intuitive/reasoned/experiential/witnessed).

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1Excerpted from: Carl Hitchens. Sitting with Warrior. iUniverse rev. 2013

– iBooks:https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/sitting-with-warrior/id489876331?mt=11

— Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Carl-Hitchens/e/B00JJ38WYU/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1407385468&sr=1-1

— Barnes & Nobles: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/sitting-with-warrior-carl-hitchens/1100372001?ean=9781450276313

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Russian Trolls Used This One Weird Trick To Infiltrate Our Democracy. You’ll Never Believe Where They Learned It:

— https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/russian-trolls-internet-research-agency_us_5a96f8cae4b07dffeb6f3434